Friday night, I returned home to find a dinner already arrayed in the kitchen: a spread of tapas Jean had prepared/obtained/foraged (likely inspired by planning an upcoming trip to Barça). There, upon the sideboard, was the wine she had opened to accompany this feast:
2005 Torres 'Sangre de Toro'
nose: cherries, stones, a touch of herbs, oak
palate:: medium body, ripe fruit, oak, decent acidity
A decent, if somewhat International, bottle of wine, it caught my attention because it's not the sort of thing that one's likely to stumble across in our cellar, despite this wine having been a staple of ours during the latter years of graduate school ($3.99 and a plastic bull go a long way to selling a penurious grad student on a bottle of wine, especially when the contents are quite decent). Ensuing conversation:
Me:"Where'd you get this bottle of wine?"
Jean: "I was down in the cellar looking for a bottle and I found this one. It seemed like it would make a good tapas wine!"
Me:"Was it in the triangle on the far left of the back?"
Jean:"Yes! That's right!"
At this point, I had to break it to hear that the bottle she'd opened was one of my bottles for the Great Heat Damage Experiment of 2008. Jean's response was to laughingly agree that she'd seemed surprised to find it in the cellar. Fortunately, no great harm done, since the retailer I'd purchased this from last year still had more and they have good storage conditions. The heat-damage group would have been much harder to replace, but Jean's unlikely to raid our dressing room's shelving to find a wine for dinner.
Mark Lipton
